Earthquake Weather (15 page)

“No. The thing is, making amends is … good for your soul, right?”

He shrugged. “Sure.”

“But before you can
do
it, you’ve got to cheat somebody.”

“I—” He laughed as he exhaled. “I guess. If you want the sacrament of Confession, you do have to have some sins.”

“Whatever.” She gave him a blank, tired look in the white glow. “Don’t speak, here, okay? Do you know any foreign languages, besides plain old Mexican?”

“Oui, mademoiselle—je parle Français, un peu.”

“That’s French, right? Cool, you be a Frenchman. They’ll figure you don’t know what your stupid shirt says.”

She pulled open the glass door of the Frost Giant, and a puff of warm, vanilla-scented air ruffled Cochran’s hair.

There was only one customer in the brightly lit restaurant, a woman in a Raiders sweatshirt in a booth by the far window. Plumtree scurried to the counter, and she was laughing with evident embarrassment as she dumped her pile of bills and change onto the white formica.

“Could you do me a
big
favor?” she asked the teenage boy who was the cashier. “My friend paid me back twenty dollars he owed me, but he doesn’t understand about American money—I can’t fit all this in my pockets! Could you
possibly
give me one twenty-dollar bill for all this?”

“I—don’t think so, lady.” The young cashier smiled nervously. “Why don’t you get rid of some of it by buying some ice cream?”

A muted crack sounded from the far booth, and the woman in the sweatshirt said, “Shit. You got any spoons that are any damn good?”

Plumtree gave the young man a sympathetic smile as he fetched another white plastic spoon from under the counter and walked around to give it to the woman.

“I understand,” Plumtree said when he was back behind the counter, “and we can come back tomorrow and buy some. But my friend here doesn’t speak any English at all, and he thinks all Americans are stupid—especially me. I told him I could get this money changed into one bill, and if you don’t do it, he’ll call me a, a
haricot vert
again. That means damn fool. You can tell he’s thinking it already, look at him.” She waved at Cochran.
“Momentito,
Pierre!”

“Ce n’était pas ma faute,”
said Cochran awkwardly.
“Cet imbécile m’est rentre dedans.”
It was a bit he remembered from the Berlitz book:
It wasn’t my fault, this imbecile crashed into me.

The name badge on the cashier’s shirt read
KAREN
, and Cochran, perceiving him as a fellow-victim of ludicrous men’s wear, sympathetically wondered when the boy would notice that he had put on the wrong badge. “Well,” said the young man, “I guess it’d be okay. We could use the ones, I guess.”

“Oh, thanks so much,” said Plumtree, helpfully spreading the bills out on the counter for him to count.

The young cashier opened the register drawer and handed her a twenty-dollar bill, his eyes on the ones and the change.

“What are you giving me this for?” asked Plumtree instantly.

The bill in her outstretched hand was a one-dollar bill.

The young man stared at it in evident confusion. “Is that what I just gave you?”

“Yeah. I wanted a
twenty.
You must have had a one in your twenty drawer.”

“I … don’t think that’s what I just gave you.”

“You’re gonna take all my money and just give me a dollar?” wailed Plumtree in unhappy protest.

The woman in the Raiders sweatshirt broke her spoon again. “Hey, shit-head!” she yelled. “You’d think with all the money you make cheatin’ folks, you could afford decent spoons!”

After a tense pause, the young man took back the dollar and pulled a twenty out of the drawer. He stared at it hard for a moment before looking up.

“I really hope,” he said quietly as he handed the twenty to her, “we’re not twenty short at cashout. You seemed nice.”

Cochran’s teeth were clenched, and he could feel his face heating up. This was abominable. He knew he should make Plumtree give back the other twenty-dollar bill, the one she had palmed, but all he could think of was getting
out
of this place. “Uhh,” he said, feeling a drop of sweat run down his ribs.
“Merde.”

“I’ll come back tomorrow and make sure,” said Plumtree, pocketing the fresh twenty and hurrying away from the counter. She took Cochran’s elbow and turned him toward the door. “Thanks again!”

Cochran was dully amazed that she could maintain her cheery tone. When they were outside again, he tried to speak, but she shook his arm, and so he just pressed his lips together. His foolish shirt was clammy with sweat now, and he was shivering in the chilly breeze.

At last she spoke, when they had scuffled away out of the radiance of the Frost Giant. “Now we’ve got a clear twenty for food and drink.” Her breathing was labored, and she was sagging against him, as if the conversation in the ice-cream place had exhausted her.

“The kid’s right,” he said tightly. “You
did
seem nice. He’ll probably lose his job.”

“He might lose his job,” she said flatly, apparently agreeing with him. “I’ll understand—I’ll respect it!—if you decide you don’t want anything to eat, anything that’s bought with this money.” She frowned at him. “Is that what you’re saying?”

“No. Now that it’s done—”

“I could go back.” She straightened and stepped away from Cochran, though she still seemed sick and wobbly on her feet. “Do you want me to give it back to him?”

Cochran shivered, and as he shoved his cold hands into his pants pockets he wondered how energetically the police might be looking for Plumtree and himself, and how easy or difficult it might actually be to get money “wired” to him from the Bay Area at this hour. Where would he go to pick it up? Wouldn’t he need a driver’s license or something? And he was very hungry, and he desperately wanted the warm relaxation and comfortable perspective that a couple of shots of bourbon would bestow. “Well—no. I mean, now that it
is
done—”

“Right,” she interrupted dryly. “You’re just like Janis.”

“I hear you’re not really a security guard,” he said—absently, for he had noticed a red neon sign ahead of them, on the same side of Rosecrans, that read
MOUNT SABU—COCKTAILS.
“I hear what you really do is burglaries.”

“She just tells you every damn thing, doesn’t she?”

A mirror-studded disco ball was turning under the ceiling over the dance floor in Mount Sabu, but none of the people in the bar was dancing—possibly because the stone dance floor was strewn with sand as if for a soft-shoe exhibition. Even over here on this side of the long room, by the street door, Cochran could feel grit under his shoe soles as he led Plumtree to an empty booth under a lamp in the corner. The warm air smelled of candle wax and mutton.

“Hi, Scant,” Plumtree said when they had sat down. “Are we going to have a drink? What—” She paused, staring at his T-shirt. “Stand up for a minute, will you?”

He slid back out of the booth and stood up, and she started laughing.

“A Connecticut pansy in … King Arthur’s
shorts
!” she gasped. “I love it! By Marky ‘Choo-Choo’ Twain, I suppose.”

Cochran managed a sour grin as he sat back down, but her obviously spontaneous reaction to the shirt had shaken him. He had to ask: “Do you, uh, happen to feel like dancing?”

“Sure!” she said brightly. “Is that why we came in here?”

“No.” He sighed. “No, and I don’t want to dance, actually. A shot of Wild Turkey, please, and a Coors chaser,” he said to the dark-haired woman who had walked up to the booth with a tray. “And …?” he added, turning to Plumtree.

“A Manhattan, please,” Plumtree said.

“And a couple of menus,” put in Cochran.

The waitress nodded and clunked down a fresh ashtray with some slogan printed around the edge of it before striding back toward the bar, her long skirt swishing over the sandy floor. Two men in rumpled business suits were playing bar dice for the price of drinks, banging the leather cup on the wet, polished wood.

“What does Cody drink,” asked Cochran, “besides vodka?”

“Budweiser.” She smiled at him. “This is fun! She’s letting me sit and talk to you. Usually I just get to go to the bathroom—over and over again, throwing up there sometimes, while Cody gets to sit and talk to the man, and she never has to get up and leave him at all.”

“Well, she doesn’t like me, you said. And,” he added, still shaken by the realization, “she seemed exhausted, a few moments ago.
She
wouldn’t have wanted to dance.”

Plumtree nodded. “That treatment this morning hit her hard. She might appreciate a drink or two herself, before we leave here.”

Cochran thought of mentioning how they would be paying for the drinks and eventual food, but decided he didn’t want to break Janis’s cheerful mood.

A frail electronic beeping started up, and he remembered that her watch had made a noise like that when she had been talking the 7-Eleven clerk into giving her all the ones and change for her original twenty-dollar bill. “What do you have that set for?” he asked.

“Oh, this silly thing. You have a watch, don’t you? I think I’ll just leave this one here. One of the doctors gave it to me—it’s supposed to keep me in
now,
and not in the past … or future, I suppose.” She had unstrapped the watch as she’d been speaking, and now held it up by one end, as if it were a dead mouse. “It’s my last link with that stupid hospital. If I leave it behind, I’ll bet I can leave all of their depressive-obsessive doo-dah with it. They
want
you to be sick, in hospitals. I bet I won’t even have my old nightmare as much, away from that place.”

In spite of himself, Cochran said, “About the sun falling out of the sky?”

“Right
onto
me, yeah.” She shook her head sharply. “Filling up the sky and then punching me flat onto the sidewalk. I was in the hospital when I was two, and I guess there was no window in my room, ’cause I somehow got the idea that the sun had died. My
father
died right around that time, and I was too young to grasp what exactly had happened.” She frowned at her fingernails. “I still miss him—a lot—even though I was only two when he died.”

The waitress had returned, and she set their drinks down on the tablecloth and then handed Cochran and Plumtree each a leather-bound menu. “Could I borrow a pen?” Cochran asked her. When he raised his hand and made doodling motions in the air the woman smiled and handed him a Bic from her tray. Cochran just nodded his thanks as the woman turned away and strode back toward the bar.

“Prassopita,” said Plumtree, reading from the menu. “Domatosoupa. This is a Greek restaurant.” She took a sip of her drink and audibly swished it around in her mouth before swallowing.

“Oh.” Cochran thought of Long John Beach singing
frolicked in the Attic mists …,
and then remembered that Janis hadn’t experienced that part of the evening. “I guess that’s all right.” He opened his own menu and stared at the unfamiliar names as he took a sip of the warmly vaporous bourbon. Finally he looked squarely at her. “I believe you, by the way,” he began.

“We’re not talking about the menu now, are we?”

“That’s right, we’re not. I mean I believe you about you being a genuine multiple personality.” He took several long gulps of the cold beer. “
Whew
! You obviously hadn’t noticed my dumb shirt before a minute ago, and Cody saw it back at the hospital; and she didn’t get that it was a joke about a Mark Twain book title.”

“You should believe it, it’s true. I don’t think Cody’s much of a reader. I am—and I love books about King Arthur, though I’ve never been able to read
One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest
.” She rolled her eyes. “You’re taking a whole crowd of girls out to dinner!”

Cochran decided not to ask what she thought
One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest
had to do with King Arthur. A slip of paper with daily specials on it was clipped to the inside of the menu, and he tugged it free and poised the pen over the blank back side of it. “Who all are you? Just so I’ll … know what names to write on the thank-you card.”

“Oh, Cody’s paying for dinner, eh? I don’t want to hear about it. Well, you know me and her … and there’s Tiffany …” She paused while Cochran wrote it down. “And Valerie …” she added.

He wrote it down the way it was generally spelled, but she leaned over and tapped the paper with her finger. “It’s spelled with an
O
—Val
or
ie.”

Cochran smiled at the idiosyncrasy. “Like
calorie.
If you had an overeater in there, you could call her Calorie, and they could be twins.”

Plumtree bared her teeth in a cheerless grin. “Valorie isn’t a twin of anybody.” She stared at the names on the paper. “Then there’s
him.
Just write ‘him,’ okay? I don’t like his name being out, even on paper.”

As he wrote the three letters, it occurred to Cochran that this Flibbertigibbet character was probably as real as Cody and Janis … and might very well actually have killed a man in Oakland, a little more than five years ago.

And then he wondered about the king that Plumtree claimed to have killed ten days ago.

“That’s a birthmark,” Plumtree said, “not a tattoo—right?”

Cochran put down the pen and flexed his right hand, and the ivy-leaf-shaped dark patch below his knuckles rippled. “Neither one. It’s … like a powder-burn, or a scar. Rust under the skin, I suppose, or even stump-bark dust. I was seven years old, and I got my hand between a big set of pruning shears and a stump-face. I guess I thought it was an actual, live face, and I tried to block this field worker from cutting the old man’s head off.”

Plumtree was frowning over the rim of her glass. “What?” she said when she’d swallowed and put it down.

Cochran smiled. “Sorry—but you obviously didn’t grow up in the wine country. It’s as old as ‘Ladybug, ladybug, fly away home,’ or the Man in the Moon.
Le Visage dans la Vigne,
Froissart called it. The Face in the Vine Stump. See, in the winter, when it’s time to prune back the grape vines, sometimes the lumpy budwells in the bowl of an old head-trained vine look like an old man’s face—forehead, cheekbones, nose, chin. People used to be real superstitious about it, like in France in the Middle Ages—they’d uproot the one that looked most like a real face, and take it out on a mountaintop somewhere and burn it. In the middle of winter, so spring would come. The old man had to die.” Throw out the suicide king, he thought.